Dead Man on the Moon (6 page)

Linus turned back to Noah, who had his kit open and was going over the place where the body had lain with the wand of a small scanner. A bar of blue light inched slowly over the gray sand where the head had lain.

"What do you have it set for?" Linus asked.

"I'm doing an exclusion search,"
Noah replied. His voice was flat.
"It'll catch anything that isn't silicon, iron, titanium, or magnesium."

"Good," Linus said, pulling out his own scanner. "I'll start at the feet."

They spent an hour going over the area. Noah's scanner picked up traces of DNA and Linus found several red fibers. Although he was fairly certain both belonged to the victim, he and Noah packaged both finds up for the lab. When they were finished, they rose. Linus half expected his joints to complain, but they didn't—kneeling on Luna didn't hurt like it would on Earth. Still, he was a bit tired. Wouldn't hurt to take a break.

"I'll get the casting materials,"
Noah said, heading immediately for the crater wall. Linus halted him with a hand on the shoulder. Even through two insulating suits, Linus could feel the tension in Noah's muscles. Clearly, he was feeling sorry for having screwed up. Good. He should feel bad.

Linus hadn't decided whether it was worth it to actively bawl the kid out later but one thing was for sure: He wasn't going to throw Junior a pity party now.

After Karen
specifically
mentioned how delicate the body was, he still broke it. He made her job more difficult, and it might even have complicated court testimony, since they'd now have to admit to a mistake in gathering evidence. So little Noah was stewing in his own guilt. Fine. Let him.

"Let's get this stuff back to the lab and take a break. We can do the casts later," Linus said."

"Shouldn't we do them now? Before the scene degrades?"

Linus made a wide gesture. "You're expecting wind and rain?"

"Oh. Right."
Noah winced.
"Old habits. Lieutenant Meeks would have skinned me alive for leaving an unfinished scene like this back in Madison."

"We're a little more laid-back up here," Linus replied. "Let's go."

Sometime later, they were back at the airlock listening to air hiss back into the chamber. Linus felt his suit sag a little around his body. He pulled off his helmet and ran a hand through silvering dark hair. It felt good to touch his own skin
again. Noah, apparently feeling the same way, scratched his arms vigorously Linus also gratefully inhaled the more humid, flower-scented air of the corridor. How the old explorers survived days and days of breathing canned air, he didn't know. They were stowing the suits back in the lockers when Noah turned to Linus.

"Could I ask you to do something?
⁷
' he said cautiously.

"What's that?" Linus set the helmet on its shelf and shut the locker door.

"I'm twenty-seven. Could you not call me
kid?"

A
laugh bubbled up, and Linus firmly swallowed it. Sure, he thought, why, I can think of a dozen other things to call you, but my mama raised me not to cuss in front of the young 'uns.
Your
mama, on the other hand— Linus bit his lip.

"I won't call you
kid,"
he said. Then added, "On purpose."

"Attention! Attention!"
said Linus's onboard in his ear.
"Incoming call from Dr. Karen Fang."

"Take it now," Linus said. "Put on three-way with Noah Skyler."

"Hoy, Linus,"
came Karen's voice.

"What have you got for me, K?" Linus said. "The ki— Noah's listening in."

"I ran a DNA sample from our victim through the identification database.
"

"And?"

"I came up with nothing. Zip. Naught."

"What?" Linus was shocked. "That's not possible, K. No one's ever avoided giving their DNA to immigration. Security down there's as tight as a gnat's ass."

"I
know that. Maybe he never went through immigration."

"Everybody goes through. Oh, you mean he landed

here but didn't stay?"

"Exactly. That happens. Shuttle crews sometimes just turn right around and go back to Earth."

"Immigration policy covers that sort of thing. Everyone who lands on Luna, even for 30 seconds, is registered with
the ID database. No exceptions. Ever. So the victim has to be in there somewhere."

"Apparently not,"
Karen said.
"The victim is registered nowhere in Luna City."

"Which means he can't exist," Linus said slowly.

"Tell him that."

The Luna City Medical Center was, like most important buildings in Luna City, located near the University, and in accordance with the unspoken rule of hospitals everywhere, the designers had put its morgue in the basement. Noah trailed Linus down the white-tiled corridor, tension stiffening his muscles until each one ached. He had screwed up, and royally. Of course, it wasn't as if he really had to prove anything to himself. Proving himself to Linus, however, was another matter. If he wanted to study here he had to hold on to his grant, and if he wanted to hold on to his grant he had to impress Linus. Four years of police work had taught Noah that no matter how pleasantly the boss might react, a major mistake meant the sere wee—Noah, in this case—would be watched like an ant beneath a magnifying glass for weeks, or even months, to come.

How could he have been so
stupid?
Rule number one of moving bodies: exercise extreme caution. Sure, this corpse had been brittle and fragile, but that should have made Noah even more cautious. He remembered the sickening
sensation of the foot snapping off in his hand, and he surreptitiously wiped his palm on his trousers as he followed Linus through the sliding double doors into the morgue.

The place was small, barely big enough to grant space to two autopsy tables and the associated equipment. Sinks lined one wall, and a bank of nine people-sized refrigerators lined the other. Noah guessed they didn't get many deaths in Luna City. The room was a little chilly, but the lighting was bright and harsh, and the air carried the familiar strong smell of antiseptic and chemical preservatives.

One table was occupied. The twisted brown body of the John Doe lay on it inside a sealed, transparent case that reminded Noah of a rounded coffin. The victim's right foot lay like an accusation beyond the ragged edge of the ankle. Even as Noah watched, bits of dry tissue flaked off and fluttered down from the body like brown snowflakes.

Behind the table stood Dr. Karen Fang. Noah hadn't seen her out of a vacuum suit yet and he tried to look at her without appearing to stare. She was quite a lot shorter than Noah and Linus, and pretty, with a definite Asian cast to her features. Her eyes were brown, almost black, and she wore her black hair in a loose ponytail. Lithe build, wiry hands, competent air.

The autopsy table looked just like the ones Noah knew back on Earth. A pair of holographic projectors were mounted on the short ends of the table like two snakes looking down on a bird's next. A small computer console jutted out for the examiner to use.

"I'm keeping him in vacuum for now," Dr. Fang said. "Abrupt exposure to a full atmosphere of pressure might crush him to dust."

"Why?" Linus asked.

"The reason you and I aren't smashed flat by the atmosphere is because our tissues are filled with air and liquid that push back with equal force. It causes the explosive part of explosive decompression if you go for a walk in vacuum. This bloke has neither water nor air in him, so he'd probably
implode."
 
She scratched her nose. "Once I've done everything I can, I'll gradually introduce atmosphere and humidity for final tests. Come over and I'll show you what I've got so far."

Her voice was neutral, but she wasn't looking at Noah. The withered brown body continued to stare up at nothing. Noah chewed the inside of his cheek. Although he had sat through dozens of autopsies and they no longer made him queasy, this one was different. The wreck in front of him hadn't been destroyed by a bomb or a car accident or a sledgehammer or any of the thousand other things that could mangle human flesh. The very life had been sucked out of this man by a force so terrible that nothing could survive it. It couldn't be ducked, dodged, or antidoted, and it took maybe ninety seconds to kill you. Then it pulled all the fluids from your body and left you desiccated. Noah thought about the silky-thin silver fabric that had stood between him and the deadly vacuum and shuddered involuntarily.

"Do you get many people who die this way up here?"

"You already asked that," Linus said.

"Don't worry yourself on that one, mate," Dr. Fang said. "We haven't had a vacuum death in almost two years. Stupid frat accident, that one was."

"What happened?" Noah asked despite himself.

"Got drunk and went outside. A few minutes later, he vomited into his helmet and took it off. His frat brothers found him half an hour later."

"Nice," Noah said faintly.

"That prompted us to install Breathalyzer programs in the suits," Linus said. "The airlocks won't open for you if your BAC is over point-oh-two." He gestured at the encased body. "Anyway, what've you got for us, K?"

Dr. Fang tapped the computer control and the holographic projectors flickered to life. The clear coffin and the brown body vanished, replaced by a skeleton. Although it looked real enough to touch, it was nothing more than a three-dimensional overlay created by the projectors, which
were in turn slaved to an imaging scanner built into the table. The setup allowed Dr. Fang to examine a body inside and out without having cut unless she wanted to. Noah's eye was irrevocably drawn to the right tibia, which ended in a jagged break. He tried not to wince.

"Working from the inside out," Dr. Fang said, gesturing, "you can see that several bones are broken. Three ribs on the right side, right clavicle, left radius, and a cracked pelvis. Right tibia. Except for that last one, I can't tell if these breaks were pre- or post-mortem."

"Why not?" Linus asked.

"Lack of body fluids. Living bones leak blood and marrow when they break. Dead ones remain dry, but the great outdoors vacuum-dried these bones long before I could examine them." She fiddled with the console and the skeleton rotated silently onto its front. "The skull is remarkably intact except for a crack on the occipital bone. If the blow was pre-mortem, I doubt it was the cause of death, though it would almost certainly have knocked him out. In short, our victim was either the victim of a severe pre-mortem beating or of some severe post-mortem trauma."

"Do you have a cause of death?" Linus asked.

"Not yet, but taking a stroll without a suit would be a good bet. I'll try to confirm." Her fingers moved across the console, and the body reappeared, though the coffin remained invisible. "Take a look at this, though. The computer can lighten his skin a little . . . there. Look at his hands."

The image's skin was still taut and brittle-looking, but the coloring on the hands had lightened until they were almost a normal tan. Dark shadows remained around the knuckles.

"Most of the desiccated blood cells are scattered fairly evenly around the corpse," Dr. Fang said. "This argues for death by decompression, actually, since explosive decompression in a micro-gravitic environment precludes lividity."

"The blood won't settle because the fluids get sucked through the tissues into space," Linus translated.

"You're a bright one," Dr. Fang said. "But look here— these dried-up blood cells have clumped in one place under the skin. They were already there at the time of exposure to vacuum."

"Bruises," Noah said.

"Right. This poor lad punched someone—or
something
— before he died. I'm betting on the something."

"Explain," Linus said.

Dr. Fang worked the controls again. The holographic view zoomed in and down, creating the unnerving image of a giant mummified hand occupying the entire table. The hand rotated and flipped over so it was palm-side up. The claw-like nails were cracked and splintered. Two had peeled back.